That's a very interesting question.

On the one hand, morphs are the only good way to identify which animals are captive bred. I mean sure, there are some imported morphs, but it doesn't take long before the captive bred for a given morph way outnumber the imports of that morph. The high initial price of morphs makes sure that the decades of hard work that need to be done to make them readily available get done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Eventually morphs will be reasonable but never as cheap as normals, which can't really be distinguished from the 10's of thousands of imports every year. Morphs are the key for differentiating between imports and captive bred ball pythons.

On the other hand, how much of the wild collection of ball python eggs is searching for morphs with the normals being just a byproduct? Maybe even without the high dollar morphs they would still work just as hard to find every last normal to meet their quotas. Still I bet the morphs they find pay the bills compared to whatever little the trappers get for a normal. And of course the breeders benefit from all the morphs that are found sprinkled amount those hundreds of thousands of balls harvested from the wild over the years.

[ Hide Replies ]

• Breeding BP helps the wild population... - kingofspades, Sun Mar 6 17:47:10 2005
• The answer is yes and no - neilgolli, Sun Mar 6 18:57:29 2005
• Catch 22 - RandyRemington, Sun Mar 6 19:31:40 2005